Judge Posner, a well known proponent of law and economics and also a perennially interesting thinker, had the following to say in an exchange with left-liberal Professor Geoffrey Stone at the University of Chicago blog:
Since security must be traded off against liberty, if the government were contemplating a really big cutback in civil liberties the concerns you express in your posting, Geof, would deserve most serious consideration. But the only serious curtailment of civil liberties of Americans that has occurred in the post-9/11 era, a curtailment that I criticize in my forthcoming book and that the Supreme Court invalidated in its Hamdi decision, was the denial of habeas corpus to U.S. citizens arrested in this country on suspicion of terrorist activity. (I would extend the right of habeas corpus to anyone arrested in this country other than in times of outright war.) The other post-9/11 curtailments are small beer. As I have argued elsewhere, the currently most controversial antiterrorist measure operative in the United Statesââ¬âthe National Security Agencyââ¬â¢s program of electronic surveillance outside the scope of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Actââ¬âseems to me, as to a majority of Americans, to be a reasonable measure, whether or not it violates FISA. FISA is designed, so far as counterterrorism is concerned, for monitoring the electronic commmunications of known or suspected terrorists. The more urgent need is to discover who the terrorists are, and if you donââ¬â¢t know who they are, you canââ¬â¢t get a warrantââ¬âwhich does not make it any less important to use electronic surveillance to try to discover who they are. Without such surveillance, our search for terrorist cells in the United States is blind and deaf.
I think this illustrates something important: we, as Americans, must increasingly restrict our historically generous helpings of liberty in order to impose law and order in the face of threats posed by unassimilable and often hostile aliens. These restrictions may be a necessary compromise under the circumstances, but, unlike the threat of powerful foreign enemies, this compromise is regrettable because these circumstances are capable of being remedied in less drastic ways that do not harm the rights of most Americans.
It’s true that some Arab and Muslim immigrants are here for opportunity, are not that extreme, are friendly and affable and nonviolent. I have many Muslim acquaintences and friends. It’s sad to me that many of these people are sullied by the actions of their coreligionists and that their collective presence in our country may, even on balance, be too costly for the preservation of the American way of life. (Like people I might befriend from other parts of the Third World, going forward I can’t know what I’ll be missing, assuming that only the most extreme of those among us would be deported in any scenario of restrictions of additional immigration from the Muslim world). The existence of good and decent Muslim Americans and Muslim immigrants does not change the fact that the au courant restraints on our freedoms that we now endure are a direct consequence of the artificial introduction of Arab and Muslims into a republic made up largely of European Christians and accustomed to an inherited and historical balance of liberty and order. We are now searched at airports, eavesdropped on by the FBI, forced to pay for long foreign wars all in the name of the counterfeit “freedom” to have aliens from the third world living alongside of us.
It’s no more contrary to freedom to keep foreigners out of our country,than it infringes on natural liberty if I have walls around my home and don’t invite a stranger in. Real lovers of liberty should see that our freedoms depend upon restricting immigration of cultural aliens, particularly Muslims. If not, in a rights equivalent of Gresham’s Law, the false freedom of open borders will replace all the actual freedoms we’ve come to cherish: free travel, physical safety, privacy, and the rule of law.
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For all its crocodile tears, the Left is secretly doing handsprings of joy about every security measure. They provide an opportunity to accuse security and law enforcement agencies of “over-reacting,” “crushing civil liberties,” “demonizing minorities,” etc., etc.
The Left hates this country and wants it to be reclaimed by Marxist economics, Jacobin-like purges of “elitists” who don’t bend the knee to political correctness, and social engineering to enforce racial and ethnic quotas. As always, it doesn’t want to solve problems, but to bring on crisis after crisis until the final collapse, so that a new, visionary society can be built atop the ruins of the old one. The more sand in the gears, the better!
Thanks to the hard Left’s strong influence over the Liberal Establishment, we wait until every problem has only tough and controversial solutions before we tackle them.
We don’t stop illegal immigrants at the border; we wait until there are 20 million of them in the country, and any serious effort to undo the damage can be derided as racism.
We don’t take a stand against Muslim immigration, but wait till there are Muslim “communities” who will vigorously protest any counter-terrorist operations that are likely to work. And a spineless bureaucracy takes the path of least resistance by treating all airplane passengers as equally likely to be terrorists.
We seem to have forgotten the proverb about the relative weights of prevention and cure.